This invention relates to gloves used in the game of baseball.
Recent baseball gloves are designed very large to provide a maximum ball receiving area in order to facilitate catches. The gloves have as large an area as about five times that of a human hand.
The large baseball glove, because of its large area, has the advantages of easy ball catching but tends to deprive the player of free and subtle hand movements when catching a ball.
When the player bends his thumb and fingers inwardly for catching a ball, the inner surface or front ply of the glove bends to follow a bowl shape defined by the front faces of the thumb and fingers in combination. The ball hitting the front ply of the glove is guided by the bowl shape of the front ply to a position centrally of the player's hand lying about the center of the front ply.
However, when such a large glove is used by a woman or child having small hands or by a small-handed man, his or her thumb and fingers do not extend fully into the thumb and finger pieces of the glove but may even stop short of inlet portions of the thumb and finger pieces. When the small-handed player bends his thumb and fingers inwardly, it only results in his fingertips pushing the lining ply of the glove forwardly and causing a portion of the lining ply opposed to the palm of his hand to move away from his hand. Consequently, the portion of the lining ply opposed to the palm of the player's hand cannot be inwardly moved closer to the hand than the fingertip positions are. It is therefore impossible to bend the entire inner surface of the glove into a bowl shape. In other words, the entire inner surface of the glove remains a near-flat surface in spite of the inward bending of the thumb and fingers of the player. Because the inner surface of the glove is not in a bowl shape, a ball hitting inner surface portions of the glove adjacent the player's thumb and fingers or the tip ends thereof cannot be guided toward the center of the glove. It has been found that there is a danger in such a case of spraining the fingers.
Thus, the known gloves have the drawbacks not only of ball catching difficulty but of finger spraining likelihood where the player's hand is too small relative to the size of the glove.